The Yahoo Annual Meeting

Me and Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!

I have attended a lot of annual shareholder meetings over the last several years when they are located within a reasonable driving distance, including the meetings for Apple (AAPL), Disney (DIS), and Twitter (TWTR). Today, I attended the Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) annual meeting today, held at the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. I have been a shareholder of Yahoo! for many years.

One of the first things I noticed when driving into the parking lot was a bunch of protestors. I'm not exactly sure what they were protesting since the signs said something about Yahoo! and whales and ivory, which Yahoo! has nothing to do with.

There were almost 100 attendees at the meeting. After the introductions and formal business, Marissa Mayer, the CEO, first showed a video then went over the company's status, progress, and future. She first talked about how the company had over 400 feature launches and 30 major launches. She pointed out that there was an 8% increase year-over-year in GAAP revenues, and a 45% increase in Mavens (Mobile Video Native Social) GAAP revenues. The number of mobile users is in excess of 600 million, tripling the number from 2012.

Some of the goals she discussed were:
1. Play to Strengths to Increase User Engagement
2.  Drive Mavens Revenue Growth
3. Simplify the Business to Improve Execution
4. Efficiently Align Resources

The company is selling off over 4,000 non-strategic patents, exiting six offices around the world, and reducing workforce by 15% by the end of 2016.

Mayer mentioned that Yahoo! now has 1 billion users, one of only three companies to reach this level, the other two being Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL).

The meeting ended with a question and answer session.

You can see the entire annual meeting here:



Disclosure: Author owns YHOO, AAPL, DIS, and TWTR,

Twitter Annual Shareholder Meeting Was Today

Jack Dorsey, CEO,
Anthony Noto, CFO,
Vijaya Gadde, General Counsel
Twitter (TWTR)

Today, May 25, 2016, the Twitter Annual Meeting was held today at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, California. There was a turnout of about 60 shareholders. At last year's meeting, Jesse Jackson showed up, but he wasn't there for the meeting this year. On the stage were Jack Dorsey, CEO, Anthony Noto, CFO, and Vijaya Gadde, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary.

Jack Dorsey lead off the meeting showing a presentation of various tweets and videos. He also went over the five priorities for the company, including refining core services and safety. He mentioned the live streaming deal with the NFL.

Then Noto went over the financials. The business part of the meeting, run by Gadde,  took about 15 minutes, where Jack Dorsey and Hugh Johnston were elected to the Board of Directors to serve until the 2019 annual meeting. Also, the Name Executive Officer Compensation passed, the appointment of PriceWaterhouseCoopers as the accounting firm passed, and and the approval of the 2016 Equity Incentive Plan passed.

Then the fun part began: the question and answer period. The first shareholder asked how the expense for software engineers is shown on the financial statements (mostly R&D), and how the stock based compensation is shown (R&D).  Noto explained that the company currently doesn't use stock options; it only issues restricted stock.

Twitter Annual Shareholder Meeting

The same shareholder also asked what types of software the programmers use. Dorsey took that question and said that it has been a transition, starting with Ruby, then Java, Objective-C, then Swift. He said that several programming languages are used, and the programmers use whatever they need to get the job done.

The next shareholder came up with three new verified statuses. He had previously recommended three last year, two of which have been verified.

One young woman came up with a couple suggestions. One was having the ability to send money through Twitter. The other was having the ability to buy Twitter stock through Twitter. Dorsey said that they are looking into a money transfer system.

A shareholder asked about what the catalyst is for an increase in the stock price and both Dorsey and Noto emphasized the push for more live streaming in the areas of sports, entertainment, and news and politics.

When asked if they were open to a takeover offer or a partnership, the answer was essentially no.

Finally, the $3.6 billion in cash that the company has came up. Noto said that they have a couple of options: share buybacks and acquisitions. Management is regularly evaluation how the money should be spent.

Disclosure: Author owns TWTR.